National Grid: The World’s Least-Sexy Lifeline, Now Starring in Every Country’s Horror Show By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a candle-lit Zoom call with the Moldovan energy minister LONDON—If you squint at night satellite photos, the planet looks like a teenager’s phone screen: cracked, dimming in patches, and inexplicably on fire in others. Those twinkling…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Vatican’s Wi-Fi dead-zones and the algorithmic cathedrals of Twitter, Patricia Lockwood has become the patron saint of Extremely Online Existentialism, a title that comes with neither a mitre nor a blue checkmark but does guarantee you’ll be quoted by melancholic graduate students from Kyoto to Kansas. If you’ve managed to miss her,…
**Robben: The Island That Refused to Be Forgotten** If the world were a dinner party, Robben Island would be that one guest who keeps bringing up everyone’s most embarrassing moments long after the wine has stopped flowing. Situated a mere seven kilometers off Cape Town’s postcard-perfect coastline, this wind-scoured slab of limestone has spent the…
**The Shiba Inu That Ate the World: How a Joke Currency Became the Perfect Mirror for Our Global Psychosis** In the pantheon of human achievements that future civilizations will struggle to explain—right alongside the Tulip Mania, the Pet Rock, and TikTok—Dogecoin stands as perhaps our most honest confession that we’ve collectively lost the plot. What…
**The Global Ripple Effect of a Sheen: How One Teenager’s OnlyFans Became a Mirror for the World’s Weirdest Values** *By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Civilization* PARIS—In the grand amphitheater of geopolitics—where nuclear doctrines are drafted, supply chains are weaponized, and the Arctic melts faster than a gelato in August—the entry of one 19-year-old Sami…
Taika Waititi and the Art of Globalized Schadenfreude By Our Correspondent Who Has Spent Too Long in Airport Lounges Somewhere over the Pacific, halfway between a volcanic eruption alert and an in-flight credit-card pitch, Taika Waititi is probably grinning. The 48-year-old Māori-Jewish-New-Zealander-of-many-hyphens has become the world’s favorite court jester: a man who can sell genocide…
KARACHI—“Brother of the Taliban’s favourite travel agent” is not the sort of résumé line that opens doors in most capitals, yet Umer Shah, younger sibling of the Afghan Interior Minister’s notorious fixer Ahmad Shah, keeps managing to slip through them anyway. While big brother Ahmad busies himself shuttling dignitaries between Kabul, Doha and the occasional…
Nvidia: The Green Giant Making the World’s Dictators and Democracies Equally Dependent by Our Correspondent in a Café Where the Wi-Fi Is Faster Than the Justice System If Silicon Valley had a Godfather, it would wear a leather jacket, speak with a mild Taiwanese-American accent, and answer to “Jensen.” Nvidia, the company that started life…
Austin Metcalf and the Great American Talent Vacuum By our Special Correspondent in Existential Airports Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the third watered-down espresso at Gate C12, a name flashed across the departure board: “Austin Metcalf.” Not the man himself—he’s still safely marooned in whichever mid-tier U.S. city currently markets itself as “the next…
PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant crumb and a NATO communiqué, Jennifer Coolidge has become a trans-Atlantic bargaining chip. The White Lotus matriarch, once America’s favorite ditzy aunt, now operates as soft-power currency in every capital that still pretends to care about culture. Berlin DJs remix her sighs into techno; Lagos hair-braiders sell “Tanya waves”; Tokyo teens…
Ozempic Goes Global: A Tale of Needles, Net-Exports, and Narcissism By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker COPENHAGEN – Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the food-courts of Dubai, a Danish pharmaceutical company discovered that the fastest route to world domination is through the human waistline. Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic—originally a humble diabetes drug—has become the planet’s most…
Robert Plant Has Left the Building—But the Echoes Are Louder Than Ever By A. N. Correspondent-at-Large, filing from a hotel bar in Marrakech that still thinks “Stairway to Heaven” is a polite request for the elevator. When Robert Plant wandered onstage last month in Tangier to yelp “Immigrant Song” for the first time since Jimmy…
